22 october 2000

Well, the move to Glasgow went more or less alright. Aside from the fact that the sofa won't get in the building and I'm going to need to get a joiner to heighten the living room door by a foot. Oh, and a plumber to sort out the leaking plumbing for the washing machine. And the oven doesn't seem to want to turn on, but no doubt I'll figure it out in the end. Minor problems, easily solved.

On the bright side, I have digital TV, I have a proper desk, I have a lovely reclining leather seat to type in, and it's still just a great house, so I don't care about the other stuff. All this means these are rather less thoughtful reviews than normal, but here we go anyway.

Let's start with BISHOP, who returns to the mainstream timeline this issue (apparently he doesn't get the "Last X-Man" tag any more), with a Maximum Security crossover. It's patently obvious here that we've seen the last of the far future timeline, since aside from a brief explanation of where Bishop's been, we don't see any of it. On that basis, it's perhaps a shame that Joe Harris and Georges Jeanty stuck around for this final issue in their run, as it's a Maximum Security crossover and has nothing whatsoever to do with what they'd been doing in the book. For that matter, next month's issue is going to be a crossover as well, and after that it's going to be a crossover with Gambit for a while. Not altogether clear why they're keeping the book around at all, come to think of it.

So this is a one-issue story trying to do something vaguely interesting given that its only instruction from Maximum Security is "Bishop comes back and meets up with Professor X." In an attempt to go somewhere else with it, Deathbird is brought in as a villain, in an attempt to give some kind of resolution to the plot thread about their relationship. Harris opts to play Deathbird as bizarrely deluded, thinking that they have some kind of romantic relationship when they plainly don't. We also end up with Bishop having the opportunity to kill Deathbird and thinking about doing it, which is supposed to tell us that he's changed in some way as a result of the last storyline, though I'm damned if I can see why that should be.

It's much what you would expect, given that the brief is to take Bishop back from the future and plug him back into a generic X-Men role. Nothing wrong with this, but nothing special.

CABLE ties up the House on the Borderline two parter in much the expected way, with Rachel interfering so that Cable wins the fight and she can go back home. Nothing altogether unexpected here, and while the idea of banishing Gaunt to the end of time to suffer because of loneliness rather than killing him is an interesting one, it looks very much like a vehicle to get Rachel back into the mainstream timeline more than a story in its own right.

The main point of interest comes from the fact that this Rachel has little or no memory of the whole Askani routine, because she didn't do any of it. That means that she's treating Cable as an elder brother figure, while Cable is having trouble avoiding treating her as a mentor figure. It's an interesting glitch for the characters' relationship, and could lead to some interesting stories if it's followed up properly.

What does seem decidedly contrived is Cable and Rachel agreeing not to tell anyone else that she's come back, so that she can have a normal life. It's not at all clear to me how letting her friends know she isn't dead is incompatible with heading off to college, and this seems like an attempt to hammer the character into a niche she doesn't really fit.

Guest art this month (not something you often say on a book with Michael Ryan as its regular artist) comes from Essad Ribic, who was last seen tying up the end of Joe Casey's Children of the Atom miniseries in an attempt to mimic the style of Steve Rude. Here, he goes for his own style, which looks to involve a lot of shading which hasn't entirely come across in the inked version. It still doesn't look bad for most of the book, but there's some sequences which look decidedly sketchy.

This one gets the job done by returning Rachel to mainstream continuity, and other than that it just gets a competent story out there. Perfectly okay.

The "Wolverine" in IRON FIST/WOLVERINE is looking even more obviously contrived this issue. At first, I was thinking that there might actually be a point to the team-up format, as Faerber established that there's a mystical wall around Tokyo, with Iron Fist on the inside and Wolverine on the outside. Fair enough, you've got a protagonist to advance the plot on each side.

But by the end of this issue, Wolverine's been joined by Captain America, Iron Man, Psylocke, Sunfire and Luke Cage, and his role in the team doesn't seem terribly distinctive. Faerber needed a bunch of heroes on the other side of the wall, and handily for sales purposes, one of them just happens to be Wolverine.

So it's an Iron Fist story, basically. Nice enough art from Jamal Igle, and a competent story from Faerber albeit playing heavily off the whole K'un Lun mythos, which has never greatly interested me. There's also a rather obvious attempt to humanise villain Junzo Muto by having him discover that his father figure murdered his parents in order to get hold of him, to which Muto responds by hitting the guy.

Not a Wolverine story, but a competent Iron Fist story. The question is, are there really many people out there interested in a competent Iron Fist story?

X-FORCE lumbers onwards, still running hopelessly late. Warren Ellis recently pointed out that until Counter-X, Whilce Portacio had published only a handful of pages in several years. He looks to be working at only a marginally increased rate now.

Fortunately, again we have Portacio's pages doing the present day routine, and Ian Medina doing the flashbacks to the team being trained by Pete Wisdom. Obligingly, Portacio buggers off entirely towards the end, leaving Medina to finish off the issue in his unexceptional but perfectly readable fashion.

It's starting to become obvious now what the point of the divided structure in this storyline is. The past sequences are basically an excuse for Wisdom to expound his philosophy (that there's all sorts of nasty things going on beneath the surface), and the present sequences give Domino an opportunity to offer a rebuttal (that the world's not as bad as all that). This still sits rather uneasily with the book's premise, since I'm still not convinced that Ellis is actually doing anything terribly new with X-Force, and having the mercenary Domino representing the viewpoint of relative optimism seems somewhat perverse.

The storyline continues with some confusing stuff about Domino being infected with some kind of thingy that repairs her body if she gets killed, while the baddies hunt her down as a result. I can't say it's a story that particularly interests me, and while this is still a reasonably well-told issue, X-Force remains the weakest of the three Counter-X books mainly by virtue of its unaccountable conviction that it's doing something new and different with its cast.

I want to like the book, I really do, but I just don't see what the point of the whole thing is meant to be.

The point of X-MAN, on the other hand, is entirely clear. This is the end of its Shockwave storyline, and serves to come up with an explanation for Nate's change of direction and adopting the role of shaman.

Last month, I commented that we looked to be heading towards Stock Ending 37C - You Died To Save Me And I Shall Honour Your Memory By Carrying On Your Teachings. And that's pretty much what we get, as the other Nate gives our Nate his chest brand (explained away as a handy device to stop his powers destroying him, thereby quickly resolving that plotline), and gets himself killed. Our Nate then goes around calling himself a shaman.

Well, such is the way of these stories. There's some nice moments along the way - the other Nate's fake attempt to destroy Asia, with a giant star falling to Earth and turning out to be a rather nice light effect for the locals to enjoy. But this is the storyline whose job is really just to set Nate up in his new status quo so that they can do some stories with that.

We're finally given a reason why Mr Scratch is a threat, which is that he's immune to all mutant powers. That at least makes him a semi-credible threat to the two Nates, but it would have been better to establish it at an earlier point in the storyline, so that the cliffhanger ending of last issue, when he showed up, might actually have had some tension to it.

Not a bad issue, but again it's more successful in its primary aim of shoving the character into a new status quo.

X-MEN #107 is a Maximum Security crossover, and this one is actually making some real contribution to the overall storyline. Once again, it's one of Claremont's better issues, perhaps because there's no scope to go off on sprawling four month storylines as he did with the Neo.

This one's got a bit more of the Maximum Security crossover to get across. Xavier's Skrull pupil Zcann has been dumped on Earth and attempts to get through to the X-Men with details of their role in Xavier's plan to end the whole mess. This involves them attacking Ellis Island at the same time as Bishop gets dumped there as well.

Somewhere in here, Cerise is wandering around too, although it's not entirely clear why. Lilandra has gone to the trouble of sending her to Earth, but Cerise doesn't actually contribute anything to the X-Men in terms of suggestions of what they should be doing, which seems to make her presence a bit pointless. Her arrival does make for a nice scene with her ex-boyfriend Nightcrawler in which he tries to explain to her that he's now celibate, though.

The plot mechanics of Zcann getting her information across are also rather confused. She turns up and touches Rogue in order to make Rogue absorb the information with her powers... fair enough. Rogue then gets shapechanging powers which she can't control... odd, and a bit pointless, but I suppose explicable since she doesn't normally use her powers on aliens. And Zcann turns into a normal human? Uh? Why? Worse, there's a scene with the X-Men telling us specifically that Rogue's accent has changed as a result of this whole thing, while Rogue is talking in the same damn panel in her usual phonetic southern accent. This is at best needlessly confusing. Claremont seems to have started off here with a good idea to liven up a basic courier role, but ended up piling on pointless elaborations until the original idea has almost been lost.

Leinil Francis Yu is back on art this month, and he's still worryingly variable. He does some good work with Nightcrawler in the opening sequence, but the fight scene at the end is a bit of a mess, and Bishop's proportions are shifting all over the place in his two-page subplot.

Nonetheless, this remains basically coherent enough to rate as one of Claremont's more successful issues. The core of the story is there and still gets across, and it's a readable enough book for all its flaws.